Reaching a conclusion after reviewing a new flagship card is usually easy – they tend to be great and pricey. However, this time around the results are puzzling and a simple and straightforward conclusion is just not something we could come up with.

Despite unleashing the whole potential of the massive GK110 GPU the card has trouble keeping up with the R9 290X in some tests. It’s a case of win some, lose some. One thing is sure – it is certainly not a Radeon R9 290X killer. It runs quieter than AMD in Quiet mode, but it loses in many benchmarks over Radeon R9 290X in Uber mode. In Normal mode, GTX 780 Ti is faster but we can imagine that R9 290X owners will run it in fastest possible way and live with the noise – needless to say enthusiasts will probably get custom cooled R9 290X cards, which could turn the tables around and knock Nvidia’s trump card out if its hands.

The Geforce GTX 780 Ti comes with three games and $100 off Shield and if you are a fan of Nvidia technologies including quite neat Geforce Experience, Shadowplay one click HD game recording, Shield PC stream gaming or G-Sync, this is the card for you. On the other hand, the R9 290X has Mantle and TrueAudio support. However, at $699 it costs significantly more than the Radeon R9 290X but again three games in retail would cost you $150+. It all comes down to what sort of games you’re after and whether you prefer AMD or Nvidia. There’s another issue – at some point AMD could offer Never Settle bundles with the new card.

Bottom line, the Geforce GTX 780 Ti is the fastest Nvidia based graphics card and it will run all games today at great resolutions and high frame rates. If you went for the $999 GTX Titan, it you might not be happy that a card that sells for $200 less is faster, but that’s how it’s always been in the GPU market. Whatever you chose an R9 290X or GTX 780 Ti you will be able to run your favourite games for at least a couple of years, so we’re calling this a tie, although AMD offers better value for money.